Alain
Miguel.

My career began in corporate banking at JPMorgan, then I left the MIT Sloan MBA program after my first year to co-found Modalyst. The idea was disruptive: anyone should be able to become a merchant without the operational burden that used to make it impossible — no warehouse, no supplier relationships to manage, no inventory to carry. We built the connections that let independent sellers launch real brands on someone else's supply chain, first through dropshipping and then through print-on-demand, where merchants could put their own branding on physical products without ever touching inventory. It reached millions of merchants across Shopify, Wix, and beyond. As the non-technical co-founder — I've never written a line of code — I owned nearly everything outside the engineering team: product, operations, finance, partnerships, fundraising, go-to-market. Modalyst grew for nearly a decade before Wix acquired it in 2021.

The acquisition changed the size of the problem, not the instinct. I moved from founder to operator to General Manager, leading ecommerce businesses many times larger than Modalyst inside a global public company — bigger teams, bigger budgets, more moving parts, less room to wing it. That same instinct for finding the overlooked opportunity later led to my being named a co-inventor on a U.S. patent for AI-driven product personalization. What hasn't changed across either chapter is what actually gets me going: I'm a problem solver and a doer, most energized when there isn't an obvious playbook and I get to build one.